Mike Pence has responded to criticism over his wife Karen (aka “Mother”) teaching at a Christian school that bans LGBTQ students and employees. Karen Pence previously taught at Immanuel Christian School in Virginia, which bans anyone who engages in “heterosexual activity outside of marriage (e.g., premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex), homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female,” from 2001 to 2013.
“We’ll let the critics roll off our backs,” Mike Pence told Lauren Ashburn, of the Eternal Word Television Network. But “the criticism of Christian education in America should stop.” Says the man whose wife works at a school prohibiting extramarital sex while his job consists largely of gazing with adoration at and sucking up to America’s foremost adulterer.
As governor of Indiana, Pence expanded a school voucher program that sent more than $145 million to private schools, most of them religious, to pay tuition for students who mostly came from families that could afford the tuition without public money. One Catholic school raised tuition to better take advantage of voucher limits and then found ways to shuffle money back to the church. And guess what: Pence sent voucher money to schools with discriminatory policies similar to the one at the school his mother-wife now teaches at. One school didn’t just ban LGBTQ students or employees; it even banned students who live in a home where there’s “homosexual or bisexual activity” or “practicing alternate gender identity.” That school got $665,000 in public money.
So when Mike Pence says “the criticism of Christian education in America should stop,” feel free to translate that to “the government should funnel money to Christian schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids and adults, have worse educational results than public schools, and teach things like that slaveholders were nice to their slaves and that dinosaurs and humans lived side by side.”